The Poverty, Promise, and Possibility initiative from the University of Chicago represents a bold and timely effort to bring together the University’s scholarly resources on issues of poverty in new, more publicly accessible, and more socially relevant ways. The aim is to highlight the useable knowledge available through the University for the purpose of illuminating both the pressing problems of poverty in our area and the practical steps that local communities can take to address such problems. For more information, visit the initiative’s website.

This talk features Timothy Knowles, John Dewey Director and Clinical Professor at the University of Chicago Urban Education Institute. He was deputy superintendent for teaching and learning at the Boston Public Schools from 1998 to 2002. At the Boston Public Schools, he has been responsible for school improvement and professional development, developing and sustaining community partnerships, and supervising principals and district staff. He was co–director of the Boston Annenberg Challenge, a $30 million effort to improve literacy instruction, and has served in a number of other administrative positions, including founding director of a full–service, kindergarten–through–eighth–grade school in Bedford–Stuyvesant, New York City.